Everyone has a talent. As a nation, ours is chucking away food. With 10m tonnes a year of household waste (60 per cent of it food waste) going to landfill, it would be difficult for the UK to become any more expert. We already throw away substantially more than our European neighbours as each adult bins £420 of food a year (a further £470 is attributable to the packaging). Unsurprisingly, this eyes-bigger-than-belly approach is a consequence of the pre-eminence of supermarkets and the rise of the weekly shop. When you buy fresh on a daily basis you are less likely to over-purchase. Then there's the BOGOF (buy one get one free), a construct of supermarket culture, more accurately referred to as 'buy one throw one in the bin'.

So, in the mass chuckout frenzy, the distinctions between 'use by' and 'best before' are often blurred. 'Use by' is found on highly perishable goods, denoting the day by which produce must be consumed, for food safety reasons. 'Best before' dates are applied to less highly perishable goods, and denote the date up to which the produce is of an optimum standard. Therefore, it's not illegal for retailers to sell on goods, but most pass, as it's not considered a good look.

Mitigating strategies are very few and far between. Thanks to Fareshare (www.fareshare.org.uk), a charity aiming to feed some 4m Britons suffering from food poverty, some retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury's and Pret a Manger, donate food just within use-by date. Waitrose recently launched a kind of untouchables range by selling off 'ugly' soft fruits that didn't fit supermarket specification at a price slightly cheaper, for jam making. Jam making, however, won't save the day.

Still, according to a recent report, 70 per cent of produce is dumped by producers and retailers before it even gets to the store. So, will ignoring use-by and sell-by dates help? One quarter of all the food waste that goes into British landfill is reckoned to be edible, and a sizeable portion of that will be food with highly conservative end-of-life dates. Whether you observe dates depends on whether you view them as labels that protect our health or as a ruse to get you to buy more. If it's the latter, you'll appreciate the freegan movement, which throws all culinary caution to the wind by advocating urban and rural foraging - from dumpster diving and skip harvesting (rooting in bins outside restaurants and supermarkets) to plate scraping (going into restaurants and scraping the leftovers straight from diners' plates - you can't be shy in this business). I am yet to find one freegan who admits to ever having had food poisoning.

Noticeably, if you buy produce unwrapped from a farmers' market it comes without a directive on when to throw it out, requiring use of eyes, nose and common sense to judge when food is dangerous. These are the kind of sustainable talents worth fostering.